Episodes 44 - 46: The Book of Geb - ATCOTRG Part 4

Sword of Air Book 2

Against the Cult of the Reptile God Part 4

Episode XXXXIV

Oozy Does It

As darkness encroaches upon the final gasp of the 20th day of Eleint, in the doomsaïd Year of the Snake…

Spooked by the sudden chill, Mherren the Malevolent pegs it for the wall.
(Some would have it he was there all along, but this Chronicler hath recalled differently. Perchance ‘tis for dramatic effect, or maybe his jaded memory doth err. Nevertheless, the Chronicle stands, and thusly shall Thinges be remembered.)
Jolly good job, too, for bursting out of the very earth behind the very spot where he was meditating comes a white and shrivelled hand, clawing and clutching at the cold air. A sinewy, wasted arm follows, bony elbows pressing, and then a head, ghastly pale, with black eyes like beads and an over-long, purple tongue lashing between sets of pin-sharp, yellowed teeth. It pulls its undead, humanoid form from the grave, cricks its neck and locks its eyes on to the retreating half-orc with dark intent.
Nearby, another black-nailed hand reaches out of the loam. And then another. And another. The first sets off at a sprint after Mherren, almost dog-like in its gait, fast and fluid, its scrawny limbs producing a terrifying speed. And with hungry hisses and snarls, the rest emerge and follow.
*
“Help me up, you stupid bird!” yells Mherren, scrabbling at the high perimeter wall.
“Well, maybe I won’t, if that’s your attitude,” says Zimlok haughtily.
Mherren casts a glance over his shoulder. A dozen ghouls racing towards him, hungry for his blood. He looks back at Zimlok. “Demogorgon fend, have you not even noticed?”
“Noticed what?” Zimlok scans around blindly.
Mherren waits impatiently, the slurping of saliva and anticipatory chomping of undead jaws now well within earshot.
Nope.
Good grief.
“There!”
Zimlok squints. Then gulps. “Oh, Lordy!” And (with considerable huffing and puffing and a series of squawks and whistles that might well be Kenku expletives) he hastily helps to heave Mherren’s hulking, scrabbling form up on to the wall top.
The ghouls slam into the base of the wall, clawing at Mherren’s trailing ankle, just out of reach. Then they begin to clamber on top of one another.
“Umm… Haji Baba! Lightstrike! Dorian! Llywilliwhatsit! A little help here?”
“Come on, there’s gonna overwhelm us!” cries Mherren, and he leaps down the other side, with a cool commando roll that turns into a race for the temple.
Zimlok follows, trying to break his fall with non-existent wings, and lands in a heap, slightly straining his ankle. “Ooooohhhh,” he says between clenched teeth, and hobbles wincing after Mherren.
Lightstrike looks up from meticulously looting the body of Misha the Holy Priestess of Geb, and adopts a pose. Haji Baba comes rolling out of the front entrance, rather squiffy on temple port. “Did shomebody shay my [hic!] name? I was having thish weird dream we were all shat around in long comfy chairs and colourful mid-humerush length shirts, and Lightshtrike was dreshed up as a human, and we were all retal-, redat-, related… and we were playing a dumb game with this massive, shnickering, shiny, shelf-shatisfied face looming over us from a gisant portal. Hic!”
“You’re crazy, Haji Baba,” says Lightstrike, shaking his head.
Just then, a joyous whooping from beyond the wall. The unmistakable sound of steel carving through flesh. Intermittent sprays of blood shower over the wall.
“What the– ?” Lightstrike rushes over to investigate, courageously (perhaps foolhardily?) unmindful of the undead danger beyond.
Zimlok, not even at the temple yet, wheels around and hobbles after him with a petulant squawk. Lightstrike takes a running leap, landing lightly on top of the wall in an epic three-point pose, as sprays of blood continue to erupt beyond his moonlit silhouette. The Blood Comet glows darkly near the zenith. In the distant shadows of the graveyard, a dark figure whirls and spins, whooping and yelling and snarling in euphoric bloodlust, its bright, glinting blade carving effortlessly through the host of undead, still emerging by the dozen from the despoiled earth.
Zimlok, at the bottom of the wall, clicks his heels together repeatedly in an effort to activate his slippers of spider climbing. “Blimmin’ things!” he swears under his breath in frustration, and thunder steps up there instead. Unfortunately, he rather misjudges his magical reemergence, and accidentally topples Lightstrike off the wall, into the mass of hungry ghouls. Zimlok looks around, blinking in confusion. “Lightstrike?”
“Down here!” yells the rogue, hacking at the ghouls with his temple sword.
“What are you doing down there?” asks Zimlok.
“F@#&!!$” Lightstrike replies, as he finishes off another foe.
A few ghouls pile over the wall, and Zimlok promptly thunder steps back to the safety of the temple, fortuitously dropping a few of the creatures with the accompanying sonic boom. Thinking he looks really awesome, he jams a few crossbow quarrels into his beak and rests Jim on Haji Baba’s swaying head.
“Keep still, Babs!”
“Who shaid that?” says Babs, closely examining the dregs of her bottle of reinforced vino.
He nocks a quarrel and fires into the oncoming mass of ravening undead. By sheer good fortune, he finds his mark.
“Whatsh going on?” says Babs.
“I think we’re being assaulted by an oncoming mass of ravening undead,” says Zimlok.
“Well, why didn’t you shay sho?” And Babs slams down the butt of her thunder staff, her pose transforming from drunken wastrel to Thunder Babs – feet planted wide, sternum thrust forward, backlit by jagged, sizzling lightning. A deafening boom rolls out in all directions, quaking the temple walls, and reducing half a dozen of the ghouls to a pile of groaning, expiring re-dead.
“There was no need for that,” says Zimlok, indignantly. “Jim could’ve taken them out without half the noise.”
“Shhhh. Wha’ever. …Ish there any more of that lovely grape juish?” And she staggers back inside.
*
Meanwhile, beyond the perimeter wall, two heroic figures cut down the rest of the ghoulish horde – one spinning, dervish-like and lethal; the other leaping and crouching and tumbling, a rune glowing brightly upon his feline forehead – until finally both meet back to back as the last unholy creature falls.
They relax their sword arms and turn to face one another. And Lightstrike’s jaw drops in amazement. No! It can’t be! A kindly tabaxi face gazes back at him. Older than he remembers it. But. It can’t be.
“M-master… Light Touch?”
His long-lost master, who taught him everything he knows. Here in the flesh. Here, before him. How? Oh, that matters not! He is here, and that is all that matters!
“It is I,” says the newcomer. “My boy, it is good to see you. Your prowess makes me – proud.”
Lightstrike, flattered and overjoyed, fails to notice the decided lack of effusiveness in his master’s words. There is no warm embrace. No twinkle of recognition in the eye, no silent acknowledgement of years spent ingensively together. Training, day after day, separated from the other tabaxi children, at his Master’s beck and call, expected to unquestioningly follow every command for more press ups, more time on the plumflower posts, straighter creases in his pantaloons, shinier pauldrons.
Training – for what? Light Touch never told him. Somehow Lightstrike knew it was not for him to ask. At least, not then. But no matter how exhausted he was, Lightstrike always obeyed, because he loved his Master. Light Touch demanded perfection, so that is what Lightstrike gave him. Because Lightstrike knew deep down that all the pre-dawn risings, all the high knees up and down the Ziggurat of Selune, all the Ninjitsu theory classes, the sword sparring, the endless hours spent in fixed martial poses – all of it came from a place of warmth and kindness in his Master’s heart. But Light Touch, as he appears now, is… cold.
“Come, come! Meet my friends!” Lightstrike tugs on his sleeve enthusiastically and together they head towards the temple. “I have all sorts of adventures to tell you about! We escaped a deadly forest, and met a witch, and the crime-king of Zobeck, and we went to a magic library on the Astral Plane, and then the city all burnt down, and we went to the Elf-forest, and I saved the Feywild from an evil dryad with Ki-Shun, and we robbed a magic fire sword from a Dwarven tomb, and there were grimlocks and svirfneblin, and the duergar couldn’t catch us, and we killed a beholder, and some mind flayers, and there was a battle with the drow, and we rescued an Elven priestess, and she died and turned into an angel and now I’m the Runechild of Arden, and then we flew out of the earth inside a giant whale demon…”
“Yes, yes. All in good time, my boy.”
They meet with the others outside the temple. Zimlok inspects Light Touch suspiciously with one sideways birdy eye. “How did you find us?” he asks, after a moment.
“Your reputation precedes you, Wizard.”
Zimlok looks rather pleased. He decides Light Touch is a pretty good egg.
Mherren turns to Dorian Llywillan. “This is Master Light Touch,” he says matter-of-factly, by way of explanation. “He’s an incarnation of Mael and the bearer of Arden’s soul shard.” Dorian and Llywillan look none the wiser, and just nod along with incomprehending expressions. Light Touch contradicts nothing of what Mherren says, although neither does he confirm it.
“You got here just in time,” says Zimlok, no longer suspicious and completely convinced this is indeed the revered Master Light Touch. “Some snake-men have overtaken this town and taken control of the minds of some of the citizens. We’ve just taken out one of their leaders,” – he nods at the stricken form of Misha upon the steps – “And we’re about to go in and flush out any more baddies that might be in here. You’re welcome to join us. In fact, it would be our honour.” And he makes a clumsy, awkward bow that makes everyone look at their shoes.
At this point Haji Baba emerges triumphantly with another bottle of vintage port.
“Oh, and this is Haji Baba. She’s a total nutca– er, I mean, a total druid, um, a totally awesome druid.”
“Enchanted, I’m sure,” Light Touch purrs, and bows deeply.
Babs lets out an enormous burp.
They go inside, draw their weapons, and bar the main doors so nothing can get out. (Them included – DM.)
Lightstrike is still prattling on to Light Touch, but hasn’t yet asked why he has sought out his student, here in the barren backwaters of the Dragon Coast, so far from Kagonost and the great boreal forest. “How did you get here, Master Light Touch? Did you use magic. I’m learning magic, you know. Zimlok was teaching me. But now I’ve got magic paladin powers from an Elder God, so I don’t need him much any more…”
“My ways of travel are – unconventional,” interrupts Light Touch, rather mysteriously, with a purr.
“Ooh! Did you travel by the Astral Plane?” asks Zimlok. “We’re old hats at Astral travel, after we went to visit Senuthius’s library at Athenaeum.”
“The Astral Sea, yes. It is the vital, interstitial fluid that connects all the planes of existence in the multiverse.”
“Mmmmhmmmm,” says Zimlok, completely at a loss. Light Touch pats Zimlok rather patronisingly on the beak.
Zimlok instantly changes his mind and decides this individual is a most untrustworthy fellow. He glowers as Lightstrike and Mherren faun around him.
Another enormous belch.
“Oop – pardon,” says Babs.
*
The heroes seven make their way upstairs to where Viper the Quasit has squeezed invisibly through a keyhole and into a long, grand-looking room containing six, larger-than-life, hooded statues of dark granite stood grimly against the walls. Lightstrike makes quick work of the lock, and Mherren steps through into the room. He presses his fingers to his lips.
“Shh – follow me,” he signals, and as they creep through, past the ominous, hooded statues, they each make the same sign to the one following, fingers to lips, which just so happens to closely resemble the gesture of three of these statues (and that of the Road members at the Golden Grain). The other three are praying. Lightstrike notices cracks around the feet of the statues, as though they might at some point have been broken from their pedestals. There are two wooden doors at the far end on the right. Zimlok takes the far one, and the rest investigate the first, from behind which come muted sounds somewhat like a child giggling. Or a hyena’s laugh.
Thus do our heroes obliviously and casually sidestep the fearsome and deadly Chamber of the Golems.
*
Zimlok finds himself in a Wizard’s wet dream. A library! Stuffed full of dusty, mysterious-looking tomes in all states of curling and yellowing and wearing and tattying. One enormous book is open on a table. Bound in dark leather, with sumptuous calligraphy and illustrated panels. The Book of Geb. A work of revelation, it would seem, in honour of the Tiller, whose constellation shines through the winter skies, before he returns upon his flying ox to bless the seeds of the new harvest.
Slightly short-sighted, Zimlok picks the book up to leaf through the pages, and promptly drops it on the floor. Several sheaves fall out. He steps on one gilded page and muddies it. “Oh, bother!... What’s this?”
Something that doesn’t belong. A parchment, inked in dense writing, and apparently an extract from a larger text entitled, The History of Arcady (see Appendix 1). Yawn. Just some old fart jabbering on about sky cities and penumbra whatever the hell they were, and harking back to the good ol’ days.
Wait. Eyup. What’s this? Blah, blah… Hecate, beholding this threat to her Ascendancy, and perceiving an opportunity to cast aside the Elder God who opposed her domain, bid Ahriman the Djinn, who owed her favour, to fashion an elemental blade of indescribable power. This sword would surpass even the might of the Five Elemental Blades of Legend, for it could slice through the Godsveil and open a pathway to the realms of the Elder Gods…
The Sword of Air!
The wizard pours over the script, alternating left and right eyes with twitchy head-turns. It describes how a great hero of old fought back the unholy host of a Great Old One, and how Arden gave up his life to banish the demon, and the hero was consumed by a homicidal madness. This historian, Mel’or’i, would appear to have completed the story told in the other fragments they had collected – the Annals of Jaladh, and the Records of Suwen! (Find these on Sword of Air’s World Anvil or in Appendix 2 of the Episodes 38-39 recap, pp.44-45.) What fortune! Ooh, I can’t wait to show the others. One up on that know-it-all, Mherren. Hah!
Zimlok goes to stuff the parchment in his robe, when he notices on the other side, formed in beautiful red calligraphic ink, a short verse entitled The Prophecy of the Speaker (see Appendix 2). Another bloody prophecy! Zimlok scoffs, but his attention is caught by the last line. Open the tomb which the Azath bound. Didn’t that silly tortle prattle on about something to do with the Azath, and a giant mason, and a Witch King, and a rock with Zimlok’s name on it? And didn’t Jo’deh also say the Black Pyramid was an Azath House? The first, in fact. And that maybe that’s where the blasted Sword of Air is? He reads it again, more closely.

With Five Elements he shall turn the key,
By its own likeness the tomb will resound,
He shall release the Aeldr, the Eternal Mason,
And open the tomb which the Azath bound.

Who will turn the key? The Speaker of the Azath? Who in Seven Heavens is that? Zimlok shrugs and stuffs the paper away. Is that the sound of fighting in the next room? It definitely sounds a lot like slicing and splurting and stabbing and dismembering… Another book catches his eye. It is on a high shelf, just out of reach, but there is something about its binding. Smooth and pale. It’s… it’s…
Zimlok manages an inelegant, lopsided vertical leap combined with a precision beak pluck to the book’s spine, and the tome comes tumbling off its shelf, and straight on to his head in a billowing cloud of dust.
Plonk.
“Ow.”
And then – horror, as he realises the binding is so smooth because rather than being leather or vellum, it would appear to be made from stretched human skin. Etched upon the front cover in gilt gold, and writ in Ancient Archeoran, a long-dead script, since superseded by the dulcet languages of Vasilea and Rothenia, but bearing some roots close enough to the trade tongue of Amarthaur and the Eastern Realms that Zimlok can get the general gist: Psalms of the Frog. Wait a second! Isn’t that the name of the other book Senuthius the Wise was missing from his catalogue of esoteric, demonic tomes, besides the Shaghaspondium, in the Astral Library of Athenaeum?
Excitedly, he opens the cover, unmindful of the increasingly frantic screams, yells, wet slaps, and gurgles coming from next door. The pages glimmer with vibrant, iridescent greens, yellows, pinks, reds, purples, blues. There is a suggestion to the eye of sinuous writing, as though so faded as to be only glimpsed when light slants to the perfect angle across the textured leaves, and then gone in motes of circling dust. Whispers, circling with the dust around his ears. So enticing… if he just stared at it a little longer, maybe he could see… maybe it would reveal its secrets… maybe…
Zimlok shakes himself out of his reverie, and clambers to his feet with an uncharacteristic cluck, placing the book carefully into his knapsack. Best go save my… ooh, what’s that? And he is arrested in mid-stride by the spine of another book. Balladidh’s Grimoire. Emon Balladidh was a founder of the short-lived Festive Conjuration and Experimental Necrotics School of Magic, from Akados, before the land was blasted to hell by the Red Wizards. Still, a big name in his field. Infamous for his incessantly rude magic mouth spells.
Good find, Zimlok! Zimlok congratulates himself. Page after page of juicy magic spells to learn! This whole adventurin’ lark was turning out to be quite worthwhile after all, even if he did have to put up with those amateurs next door. (A faint Aaarrggghhh! filters through the wooden panels.) What’s more, this looks to be one of those enduring-type spell books, that can’t be easily burned or soaked, and it has many blank pages ready to be filled. (You can copy your existing spells into it when you get a mo – DM.)
And here! On the shelf below: A Discussion of Morality and Spirituality in Native Witchcraft Practices of Barcella, As Disputed Between His Most Esteemable Grace Huang’di, and his Adviser, Boki, written in Xian logographs and containing more tantalising magicks and incantations. And here! A Short Criticism of Elementalism, by Clementine Phu’huille, writ in Old Arcadian, weighing in at 1,272 pages, and containing two more lovely spells to pilfer. And here, another! Penned by Misha herself, it would seem. Titled, simply, The Change – Notes. An account of some kind of physical transformation. A metamorphosis. Blah, blah. Zimlok dismissively leafs through to the end. Aha! More spells! What luck! (Spells are listed in Appendix 3.)
Another hysterical, mangled battle cry from the next room. Zimlok looks around mournfully at all the books, has a few quiet moments of debilitating moral quandary, gathers up what he can carry, makes to walk purposefully from the library, has another moment of excruciating moral dilemma, then a bout of acute indigestion, and finally exits to catch up with his companions. Looks like the rest of the library is mostly just boring theses on farming techniques and obscure ecclesiastical existential philosophy, anyway. Luckily, as he closes the door behind him his beak starts to itch and he scratches it with his two forefingers, in a gesture again resembling that of the hooded statues. He slips into the next room…
*
… To find a bloodbath.
Lightstrike is standing with one foot on the corpse of an abhorrent, bull-sized creature that looks like an obscene cross between snake, crocodile and lizard, with protruding tusks and viciously clawed feet. The tabaxi tugs his temple sword from the dead Broodguard and grins at Zimlok.
“Look! It tried to grab me through the wall,” he says, pointing to a hole smashed in one of the panels. Zimlok looks around to see he is in some sort of torture chamber, with a rack against one wall and an iron maiden against the other. Shackles, all empty, hang from iron rings embedded in the external stone wall of the temple.
Mherren is just wiping soot and gore off Maagog’s Blade, which seems to shiver with satisfaction, on to the blood-matted fur of a huge, savage-looking Flesh Gnawer gnoll. Four more gnolls lie sprawled in bloody disarray at the feet of Haji Baba, Light Touch, and the half-elves.
Babs has crimson stains all around her mouth and across her brow. “They had a funny look in their eye. Dead-eyed, like some of the townsfolk,” she says between gritted, bloodstained teeth, as Zimlok hastily takes off his magic crab-claw gloves.
“We wondered if they might have been under the cult’s charm spell, just like the kidnapped Orlanians,” offers Dorian.
“We wondered if they might have proven allies if we’d found a way to snap them out of it,” agrees Llywillan. “The enemy of my enemy and all that…”
“But then the druid fell into a bloodthirsty frenzy and ran at them, full pelt, spittle-a-fly, yelling: Kill ‘em all! at the top of her lungs. And now…” Dorian gestures forlornly and shrugs.
From behind his hand, thumb wagging in Babs’ direction, Llywillan acquires a worried look. “She gets really blimmin’ furious, doesn’t she? Is she, er, is she okay?”
*
Their ambushers had been secreted in an adjoining dormitory strewn with simple straw mats around a crude, low table. Secret peepholes had allowed them to spy on our companions and gain the element of surprise. It had proved scant advantage.
Mherren sends Viper back the way they came to make sure no more ambushers are prowling the temple, while the rest press forwards into another room, its walls daubed with strange markings and scratched with incoherent ravings. Loose stone chips litter the floor, and a winding corridor leads from the far wall. With Lightstrike and the half-elves taking the lead, they pad along the corridor, which takes blind turn after blind turn. Rounding the last corner, they are confronted by an obese man in the garb of an abbot, except he is dirty and unkempt and has a wild look in his eyes. It is pitch black, and yet he seems to be able to see the intruders perfectly. He casually flips a coin in one hand, which seems to glint despite the lack of light.
“So nice to have visitors,” he smiles, and winces at the strain of it. “It’s normally just the two of us.”
And with that he attacks.
Whooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh–snick!
He hasn’t made it three paces before Lightstrike’s vorpal boomerang takes his fat head clean off.
“Another easy kill,” sighs Lightstrike, distinctly underwhelmed by Father Abramo, pocketing the magic coin still spinning on the floor.
Boom!
“I could really do with more of a challenge, y’know? Test my boundaries? Find my limits?”
BOOM!
“Lightstrike?”
“I mean, it’s all very well winning all the time, but when you’re never really pushed, it’s just not that satis…”
BOOM!!!
“Lightstrike!”
Mherren rushes through, Viper perched upon his shoulder. “Erm, you know those statues…?” he pants, and then his eyes widen and he points at the body of the abbot. Or rather, he points at what used to be the body of the abbot, for congealing and oozing from the corpse is a glistening, black, slimy mass of pure malignancy, seeping inexorably towards Lightstrike’s boots.
Llywillan tries firing arrows into the thing, but they make little impact and the heads immediately corrode away. Haji Baba calls on the scorned rage of Nature to bring forth a magical, destructive moon beam, but her magic sputs and fizzles embarrassingly. Dorian wades in with his sword, but when he cleaves the thing in two it merely redoubles its attack as two separate, flailing puddings, and with a scream he is consumed and dissolved, only a few bits of leather and bone remaining in the black pudding’s amorphous, seething mass.
“No!” cries Llywillan, and sends arrow after arrow into the twin oozes, tears running down his cheeks.
“Fall back, Llywinnillwotsit!” shouts Lightstrike. “It’s getting too close!”
But it is too late, as the foremost ooze rolls over the half-elf, and he too meets an unenviable end. Our heroes are trapped, it would seem, between these unnatural horrors and the oncoming golems –
BOOM!!! BOOM!!! BOOM!!!
*
“Do you hear that?” shouts Lightstrike over the fray. A tiny voice, feeble but penetrating through the wall of the abbot’s quarters. “Someone’s shouting for help! It’s a false wall!”
“I don’t care!” Zimlok shouts back. “I’m getting out of here!” And in sheer, frantic desperation he begins to beat at the solid stone wall.
In the midst of the struggle, Light Touch steps behind Mherren and leans in close. “Give me the sword,” he purrs softly and persuasively. But his voice has changed. He sounds – like something not of this Plane. “Give me the sword.”
The rugged half-orc shrugs off his charm attempt. “Er – don’t fink so!” he laughs.
The being posing as Light Touch snarls in frustration as Haji Baba begins to focus her destructive magical energy upon the wall. Mherren joins in, but then Light Touch leans in again, his tongue even more silvered.
“Give. Me. The. Sword. Now it is found He wouldst have it returned to Him. He would not want that it remain in the hands of such fools as thee!”
Mherren pauses to think for a moment. This dude kinda has a point. I mean, if he’s been missing it all this time… and we are kinda douchebags sometimes…
Almost with a flourish of ceremony, Mherren, Warlock of Demogorgon, offers the Blade of Maagog to the creature calling himself Light Touch. But as their hands brush, Mherren notices something highly irregular: although Light Touch’s hands look normal, when they touch it feels as though his thumbs are on the wrong side.
“Good boy. You know it makes sense.” A malevolent grin splits Light Touch’s face.
“Noooo!” cries Zimlok, seeing Mherren under Light Touch’s spell. And he circles his hands and makes a lifting and clutching gesture, as a magical earthen hand reaches out of the floor to grasp around Light Touch’s ankles.
Mherren feels dazed. Groggy. He shakes his head and his vision begins to clear. There before him, Light Touch holding the Flaming Tongue of Duorik Ironside aloft in triumph. “How…?”
Light Touch, stepping lightly and easily from Zimlok’s earthen grasp, flashes them both another wide, feline smile. “Thank you so much. You made this so much easier for me than I’d anticipated.” With a bow, he begins to work his hands in circles, and his physical form begins to fade. It changes, too. He looks less like Light Touch. Still catlike, but less an avuncular tabaxi, something altogether more demonic. He cackles as he begins to cross the planar threshold.
“He’s teleporting away!” warns Zimlok.
“Aithindée!” whispers Mherren. The elegant sword erupts into flame in Light Touch’s grip. Mherren grabs the hilt and yanks it from the creature’s grasp. Impossibly fast, with audible, gleeful anticipation, the fiery blade arcs down upon the imposter. “Take that, itty-bitty-kitty,” quips the warlock. (Yeh, work on those, Mherren – DM.)
Light Touch yowls and lashes out at Mherren, catching him across the cheek with cruel talons as his ethereal body resolidifies.
BOOM! BOOM!
KA-BOOM!!!
The floor trembles at the fast-approaching golems, and then the wall erupts in a blast of sonic energy. Huge chunks of stone are thrown outwards as Haji Baba, eyes rolling, mouth frothing at the corners, finally punches through.
Lightstrike is on his knees. Praying. Witnessing the half-elves’ horrific end, seeing he has been fooled by this imposter posing as his long-lost master, and pinned between advancing golems and unstoppable puddings, he prays. With fervour he prays to Arden. With anger, too. And he prays with all his soul to Elovyn Sorrowsong.
“Elovyn, come to our aid.” He mutters the words over and over under his breath, eyes screwed shut. He turns her golden amulet over again and again in his perspiring palm. “You promised you’d come. I beseech thee, save us from these horrors!”
And before his kneeling form a figure materialises in a flash of blinding radiance. Long, flowing, white hair. Purest white-enamelled plate armour. A visage of perfect serenity. Holding her two-handed great sword, a heavy mace slung at her belt, Elovyn Sorrowsong smiles softly at the Runechild of Arden, whose marked brow glows brightly, as she touches her booted toe upon the floor.
“So soon?” she asks, and gathers him up in her arms.
“My friends…”
“Don’t worry, I’m a-coming!” And Haji Baba launches herself at Elovyn, simultaneously transforming into a cockroach and landing in her angelic ear. Undeterred, Elovyn leaps through the hole in the wall, snapping out her white-feathered wings and beating them hard to hover above the temple. Looking down, they see Mherren and Zimlok tumble out in a tangle, closely followed by Light Touch, who pauses for a split second, snarls again, and dives after them.
As he plummets after the warlock and wizard, a huge stone hand reaches out, clutching its fist at empty space, and a creeping darkness begins to ooze down the walls.
From somewhere within, a plaintive female voice, faint and desperate. “Help… me!”
*

Episode XXXXV

Asuran

Pale moonlight washes over the stoic Temple of Geb. The paradoxical light of Dark Hecate reflects in the consciousness of the creatures below. They say She is the true form of Yarila and Porevidh, the Ascendant Twins of the Elves, and they say she is Luna, who ever-circles those minds that meet her gaze. Her tidal cycles lend them movement, rhythm, breath, memory, birth, death, rebirth, resonance. Her presence illuminates both their bodies and their minds. Beneath Her singular beatific gaze, ten thousand moons look up, and see themselves. Their own light. Their own darkness. Their own purity. Their own heavenly being.
But tonight Her light does not shine pure. A streak of red, like a bloody gash carved into the firmament, stains Her perfection. The Blood Comet, Harbinger of the Days of Doom, passes close by, and poisons her white light with its crimson radiance, and all beneath are tainted. The taint reaches into every mind of every creature. Reaches into their bodies. Twists them. Corrupts them. Maddens them. Where once there was the lifegiving cycle of light-dark-light-dark, now an ominous presence looms behind the moon, threatening to swallow her in its maw of Void. To consume her eternal cycle. Her eternal breath.
The Maw of Yuggoth.
The Dark Planet. Its alien mind and intent beyond the ken of mortal kind. Drawing ever closer, already dwarfing the moon’s pale face. The Dark Planet comes to suffocate all. It is unknowable, indifferent, pitiless, tormenting, devoid of all hope, of all renewal. The black disc of Oblivion.
One by one its baleful heralds arise. One by one they begin to show themselves. Gaining confidence. Increasing in certainty that the Age of the Great Old Ones is nigh. Those who were banished, shall return. The familiar cycle is breaking. Breath is short. Memory is fading. Connections are severed. Each being, each drop of moonlight, trickles away into oblivion and no longer reflects the glory of Dark-Bright Hecate, Mother of Magic. All is separate; none bears witness. Her perfect mind, tarnished, despoiled, rusted, wasted. Where once she shined forth flawless wonder and serenity, now she bathes the world in a sickening foretelling of bloodshed.
But there, above the temple, hovers a being as yet untouched by the unholy tinge of red. Below the defiled, pink orb, the pure-hearted angel of a sundered elder god perches lightly upon the temple’s gable roof. And her light is purest white. Not cold and pure like the moon, but warm and nurturing, giving, ripening, like the sun. She is no friend of Hecate, this angel. But she needs Her just as all beings do. This baleful intruder, this Dark Planet, it is not of this world. It is not the mere absence of light; it is its opposite, its nemesis. It is a stain, a void, a devourer, a shadow.
And as the light fades, the shadows grow longer…
*
From the arms of Elovyn, Lightstrike the Epic reaches out to his falling comrades. “Nooooo!” he mouths silently. Haji Baba the Cockroach rubs her legs together and vomits a little.
Mherren and Zimlok, clasped together in slow-mo mid-plummet, are looking up in terror at the demonic feline entity that is diving after them.
“Quench me on its blood!” urges the Flaming Tongue of Idu Maagog. Mherren narrows his eyes. As Zimlok whispers words to make them fall like a feather, Light Touch (who no longer resembles Light Touch) collides with them, and they all go tumbling and sprawling painfully across the rubble blown from the temple wall.
Zimlok all-out panics for a moment before he realises he isn’t dead – it’s just his hat fallen over his eyes. Cautiously, he lifts the brim and peers around. Nobody saw that. Good.
Light Touch, no longer the elegant swashbuckler, is staggering, dusty and bruised, towards the broken form of Mherren. “He has waited long centuries for his blade to be found!” yells Light Touch. “Too long has it been walled away in that godsforsaken tomb! Too long in the clutches of dwarfs! Now my Lord Idu Maagog, the Vanquishing Fury, the Rage of Titans, the Cleansing Heart of Fire, shall claim what is rightfully his! What was forged upon his own anvil, by his own hand!”
Mherren is groggily swaying to his feet.
The cat-demon continues, regardless. “Idu Maagog shall be free of his infernal prison! He shall defy Asmodeus, his unjust gaoler, and sit once again upon his throne in the City of Brass! He is missing but one thing: Narsilambe tel Maagog – the Elemental Sword of Fire!”
Mherren wipes blood and spit from his lips, lowers his brow, sets his jaw.
The imposter continues, oblivious. “And I, Asuran, obedient Servant of Maagog, shall have the pleasure and honour of claiming it for him! Never have I failed my master, and I shall certainly not be thwarted by such a barmy band of mooncalves as thee! Heed my words, I will never rest! Now give me the sword, or d…”
Flame Tongue whistles round in a deadly arc, carving through Asuran’s flank and biting into his abdomen, even as Mherren falls to the floor in exhaustion. As the cat-demon is spun around by the force of the fiery blow, Elovyn slams into him from on high and brings down the hilt of her great sword upon his skull. He buckles, but finds some inner strength to tap upon. His curving scimitar lodges in Elovyn’s shoulder. She is relentless in her angelic fury, forcing him back and to the ground with a remorseless succession of strikes. Lightstrike wheels and feints at the periphery, almost a blur such is his uncanny speed, finding openings whenever Elovyn presses the creature back. Asuran pants hard, drops his guard for a second as he scans around for Mherren and the weapon he craves.
*
Zimlok, tipping back his still uncooperative hat, crawls over to where Mherren has collapsed. “I’ll get you outta here, buddy,” he says, and with a flick of the wrist and a waggle of the fingers he thunder steps them both to the far side of the perimeter wall, where he duly swigs back a potion of endurance. For practical purposes, of course – he can do without it, you understand. “Ahhhh,” he grins, and the astute amongst you might discern a little ruddiness appearing in his cheeks behind the blue-black sheen of his feathers.
Unwilling to risk another close call, Mherren sheathes Flame Tongue and brandishes Pyron instead. “Let’s finish this,” he says, deadpan, like the cool lead actor in the latest blockbuster mummer’s play, and they charge back into the fray.
*
“Yaaarrrggghhhh!!!” Haji Baba hits the puddings again and again with her spheres of flame, flattening them and forcing them backwards to where Asuran is locked in combat with Elovyn and Lightstrike. One of them tries to envelope Elovyn, and she leaps away with a flap of her wings. Lightstrike ukemi-rolls backwards, inches beneath the cat-demon’s deadly swinging scimitar, and finds a gap to slice upwards with his temple sword. Asuran, finding a moment to breathe, searches desperately for Mherren and the Elemental Sword…
… And his eyes lock on another, unfamiliar orc, dancing around with the coveted blade. Taunting him with it. A stupid dance, with lots of thigh-slapping and jigging and waggling bits in all directions. Enraged, Asuran charges forwards…
… And falls headlong into an oozing mass of black ichor. He thrashes around. He screams. He writhes and kicks.
And he dissolves.
Zimlok drops the illusion of the prancing orc with a satisfied smirk, and picks up the card with a snap.
The Deck of Illusions. Works every time. (Erm, beg to differ – DM.)
But Zimlok does not notice what Mherren notices. Unlike Dorian and Llywillan, Asuran was consumed completely. No trace. Almost as though he were pulled back to some other dimension as soon as he perished. Mherren thinks of his quasit – a demon, who returns to the Abyss whenever he is killed on this plane of existence. Could there be some parallel there? Was Asuran really some demon or devil; not dead, but merely banished to his home plane, wherever that might be? Have we truly seen the end of him?
Mherren surveys the battlefield. There is Elovyn, furiously beating on a small host of baby puddings with her mace; Haji Baba, looking suitably imposing (in spite of her stature), ravaging the larger puddings with spouts of fire and shards of ice; Lightstrike, cursing his snapped bowstring; and Zimlok, adopting a stance, squinting down his beak through Jim’s reliably skewwhiff sights.
“This black pudding is toast,” he says, and lets a quarrel fly. The last ooze collapses in a lifeless morass of gunk. Zimlok looks around to make sure everyone is watching.
*
But, as Elovyn Sorrowsong heals her friends with the holy light of Arden, and begins to speak her fond goodbyes before she departs for the heavens once more, and as Haji Baba siphons black pudding juice into her (seemingly endless supply of) glass vials, let us leave this scene of carnage, dear readers. Let us retreat within the Temple of Geb, to where an ugly little demon is pressing his ear to a wall.
*
“Help…” a voice whimpers weakly from the other side.
The abbot’s chamber is cramped and dirty, with a straw pallet and battered-looking clothes chest. Muddy rags litter the floor, which on closer inspection turn out to be discarded tapestries of idyllic pastoral scenes and rural folk. In contrast, two plush armchairs consume half the space, and a beautiful ceremonial robe hangs from a wall hook. More hooks dot the walls, some more like meat hooks than clothes hangers.
A heavy mahogany desk is pushed against one wall, with slide marks at its feet running away from the wall. The desk is covered I graffiti and what appear to be the mad ravings of a lunatic. Most is incomprehensible, with a few phrases standing out here and there: snake mother, silbilant one, redemption, metamorphosis, shedding, stone of Yuggoth, spawn of Yuggoth…
Viper tries to pull the desk away from the wall to test the panel behind for a secret mechanism, but he is too weak to budge it. He looks again at the hooks. One is set deeper in. He wonders, if he pulled on it…?
BOOM! BOOM!! BOOOMMM!!!
He gulps. “Uh-oh.”
Popping invisible, he flits out of the room in bat form and finds himself in a maze of lumbering stone pillars. He swerves and rolls through the golems’ legs, around the breakneck corners of the defensive corridor, and bounces off the last thigh to pop back into view.
He whistles. “Phewwweeeeeee! Hey, boys! Over here!”
The golems come to a juddering halt, and simultaneously peer over their shoulders.
“Seeya!”
The quasit darts off, the golems wheeling cumbersomely and giving chase. He leads them past Babs’ hole, through the torture room to the chamber of empty pedestals. He thinks hard, steepling his fingers at his lower lip. What would Mherren do? What would Mherren do?
As the golems burst in, Viper looks up, eyes wide, palms pressed together.
… And, to his enormous surprise, the golems quietly and obediently return to their positions.
“Oh. Well, that was easy.” (Grrrrrrr – DM.)
“Now, shhh. Stay there now, if you know what’s good fer ya,” he hushes them, and slinks away, back to Babs’ hole.
One hooded statue shifts a foot…
… And settles into its posture, forefingers pressed to its lips.
*
Our heroes are gathered among the cracked, ooze-stained rubble of the temple wall. Grimy. Bruised. Bloodied. But undeterred. (Well, maybe Zimlok feels a little bit deterred.) Mherren describes to the others what the quasit has found.
“We should go back in,” says Lightstrike.
“You’re crazy,” says Zimlok.
“Maybe,” winks Lightstrike.
*
Mherren heaves the desk away from the wall and kicks through the secret panel behind it before Viper can pull on the hook. They duck through, to find a lightless chamber scattered with wood splinters and chunks of rock. Four defaced granite fragments, pieces of what might have once been a large idol of Geb, are now crudely shaped to resemble what might be hideous, serpentine bodies, limbs, or tentacles. In the corner, another statue, nearly five feet in height, similar to the one beneath the Golden Grain, but far richer, being carved of sumptuous yet unearthly-looking violet, brown, and green jade. Almost translucent, and seeming to shift within as though its core were fluid and without true form. A coiled serpentine body, its snake’s head bearing the face of a beautiful woman with forked tongue. Smiling a hideous smile. Just looking upon the thing is difficult. Nauseating. Unnerving.
And there, in the corner, a cage hanging from the ceiling. Within, a small figure hugs its knees and draws back against the bars.
“No need to fear, child,” says Haji Baba. The druid’s eyes are bloodshot, her hair wild, her cheeks smeared with blood and black slime. One of her teeth is chipped. The prisoner presses back further.

“We’ve come to save you,” says Lightstrike. “I’m Lightstrike, and I’m Epic. And these are my friends.”
The young, caged girl pushes her straw-coloured hair back out of her eyes and studies the motley crew standing before her. A crazy-looking halfling, a looming, scarred orc, a strange little raven-man in a funny hat, a – uggghhh, what is that? – some kind of ugly little horned demon. And an angel?! She looks back at Lightstrike, who is still grinning at her winsomely.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“C- C- Cirilli. Cirilli Finla,” she manages.
Mherren trawls his memory. Finla. He’s heard that somewhere before recently. And her manner of speaking. It sounds like someone… oooh, it’s on the tip of his…
“Why did they put you here?”
“I was captured by thieves. Derek Desleigh and his mob. They were operating out of the Golden Grain. Took me and some others. Two of my brothers. My stepda’, too. Bound us up and threw us below ground. Then, late at night, they loaded us into a cart and took us blindfolded to the Foaming Mug. I know that road well. Recognised the turns. They handed us over to some… some creatures. I don’t know what they were. They spoke in some awful language, sounded like they were speaking in curses, so mah daddy would have said. They were big. Strong. Claws like reptiles’. They took us north. Into the forest. Might have been the Silent Woods, or the Groves of Nephthys, I’m not sure. It took us all night, and the next day. We were in some kinda bog. They took us belowground. We were chained and lined up. They… they presented us one by one to… to…”
“Don’t be scared. You’re safe now.”
“To… her. Defidia. She was… like that statue. Only bigger. Much bigger. And her voice was so… captivating. She wanted me to join her. Her cult. Her church. Said it would make her betrothed so happy. I… I… her will was strong, but, somehow I resisted. I – pretended. I told her yes. I got thrown in a cell with some others, and we got taken back to Orlane. The others, they weren’t themselves – their minds were hers. But my brothers, and Bertric – they weren’t with us. I wonder – what do they do with those who resist openly. Who cannot be charmed. Who defy her will? There were whispers, of a ceremony. A ritual. An affront to Nature… A sacrifice? A summoning? Some dark torment, I know not what. Black gods, the whole thing – it was awful, like a nightmare!”
“But the others were taken home. Why are you here?” Lightstrike persists.
The girl, perhaps only twelve years of age, sighs and bows her head, her bedraggled, twisted locks slumping forwards. “They singled me out. I don’t know why. Perhaps they knew I’d evaded her spell, after all? They brought me to Misha, and she handed me over to” – her upper lip curls and she spits his name, her eyes moist and red – “Abramo, the abbot. Said he wanted me to help him with his research. Taught me how the Temple of Geb is built on the site of an old pagan altar to Sseth, a primitive, reptilian god thought to be relegated to history. He told me how Sseth had spoken to him. How he had shown him his path. And shown him the ritual. Said he had received, and now it was his honour to give. A gift, he called it. A new life. I said no, I don’t want it. There was a blackness in his eyes, his skin was peeled, like his flesh were rotting. He was – diseased. Black pus oozed out of the sores. He stank. His flesh crawled, like there was something flowing under his skin. He said I had been chosen. He was going to change me. Make me to be like him.”
“He’s gone now.”
“Gone?”
“Forever. We’ll look after you. Come.”
“Will you go after her?” She nods towards the jade statue.
Lightstrike nods.
“She has powerful evocation magics, besides her charm,” Cirilli warns them. “She is sure of herself, and she has many henchmen. But I’m living proof. Her wiles can be resisted. There is hope.”
Mherren easily breaks the rusted lock on the cage and helps the girl out. Then suddenly jumps in the air, startling her. “That’s it, I’ve got it! Who you remind me of! It’s the Traveller!” he exclaims, beaming. Everyone looks at him, confused. “Gideon! He’s your father, right?”
She stares up at the half-orc, her lips trembling, tears welling. “You know my father?”
“Yeah, bumped into him the other day. Nice fella. Cool hat. Got a whole mysterious cowboy vibe going down.”
“He’s returned! At last! Take me to him, please!”
Mherren helps her down, rubbing the wound where Asuran had clawed him. Elovyn had closed it and restored the blood and tissue, but it still stung like hell. A deep, evil throb that trembled hell’s curses through him. He grimaces.
Searching the clothes chest, they find a small pellet of what looks like rather indigestible material that might have been extracted from something’s digestive tract, and a shiny little kazoo, along with a silver brooch and a smooth, spherical crystal shaped like a worry stone. There is also a rather fetching wizard’s hat, which Zimlok snatches up and immediately starts trying at various tilts and angles.
Outside, Misha’s body has been dragged from the steps. “There’s something still in there. Besides the golems,” mutters Haji Baba, who is just beginning to sober up and is in the process of acquiring a storming migraine.
“I still have a little time before I must return,” says Elovyn. “Rest. You all have a great task ahead of you. Return to Orlane with the girl. I will finish things here.”
She steps grimly inside. Zimlok, ignoring her words, or (more likely) just not listening, follows on, obsessively tweaking his new hat for the right amount of flop in the point. Lightstrike thinks to ask where she must return to, but as his mouth forms the words the moment is gone.
There, upon the communal dining table, four silent monks from elsewhere in the temple have laid out Misha’s bloody, headless body. They are preparing her for burial. Or for something, at least. Elovyn rushes in, her long blade a swirling justice. The heretic monks don’t stand a chance. Zimlok boshes one on the head with a pewter mug for good measure. The monk was already unconscious, pummelled by Elovyn, but Zimlok generously counts it as a kill to him.
The others enter, gawping at the blood-splattered scene of violence.
“… And there’s more where that came from,” Zimlok says to the monk he whacked, sticking out his fists and hopping from foot to foot.
“I can only remain here for short periods once summoned. Now I must go,” says Elovyn. “Lightstrike. You will find your master. Have patience and wisdom. Arden’s light will guide you. When next you are in dire peril, ask and I will come. But have faith in yourself. You can accomplish more than you think. I can only be summoned twice more, and then I must retire beyond the Godsveil forever. Godspeed to you all.”
She smiles fondly at them all, and then, in a flurry of white, scattered feathers, she is gone. Lightstrike bends down to pick up a feather. “What now?” he asks, his voice distant.
Haji Baba steps to the fore. She stares at Misha’s supine form. “Now. We burn her.”
*
As they turn their backs upon the still-crackling pyre outside the temple, there is a hammering upon the perimeter gate, by the old bell. Hands twitching over sword hilts, the companions creep closer.
“Who goes there?” barks Mherren.
“’Tis I, Kilian Gade, the armourer,” comes a familiar voice. “We heard the commotion up here from the town. I have the wizard, Ramné, with me. And Gideon.”
“Pa?” Cirilli cries out with a sob.
They ease the gate open and she rushes into the arms of her father, who holds her tightly and murmurs to her from beneath the wide brim of his Stetson. Eventually he turns to the heroes. “I can never repay you for this,” he says, his deep voice cracking. “You have mah undyin’ gratitude.”
“It was nothing,” says Lightstrike.
“It was a piece of cake,” says Mherren.
“A lethal piece of cake,” corrects Haji Baba.
“Speaking of cake, let’s all head to the mayor’s home, talk things through over supper. He does a mean pudding, I hear,” says Kilian.
“Not black pudding, I hope!” chimes in Zimlok, and everyone falls about laughing like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, even the three townsfolk to whom the joke can have made absolutely no sense. In fact, they all laugh so hard and for so long that Zimlok begins to wonder if they’re making fun of him. Then he decides, no, he really is incredibly funny. And he joins back in with the others as Misha’s body burns black in the background.

* * *

Somewhere, in a cave lost to fathomless darkness, a slowly spinning orb, moist and translucent like a fish egg, hovers in space. It emits a pale green light, and moisture trickles across its pulsing membrane. From within the orb, muffled and somehow distant, yet still capable of piercing the heart, come terrible screams of agony.
There in the shadows, back turned, musculature like wrapping tree trunks – an immense figure, tattooed with runes that glow like white-hot fire. A voice, like a cracked mountain, rumbles forth. “You failed me.”
The cries of anguish intensify. Then another voice, wracked with pain, yet unmistakably familiar, speaks from within the turning egg. “I found Narsilambe. I had it in my grasp.”
“And you lost it.”
“We know who has it. A half-orc. Some kind of warlock. He had a demonic familiar. He’s tough, but his friends are weak. I would have taken the sword, but they summoned an angel to their side.”
“An angel? And a demon? Fighting together?”
“Master, yes.”
“Hmm. Most unusual. When you are fully reformed, you will complete the mission. You will not fail a second time.”
“Master, no.”
“I will have my blade back. And I will burn this infernal prison and reclaim my city.”
“Master, yes. The City of Brass. The Efreet shall delight at your homecoming.”
“Then I will claim my blood toll on the Ironcrags. And then I seek out Asmodeus.”
A pause, then the voice returns like an earthquake, like the earth devouring and swallowing itself. “I am Maagog. I do not forget.”
“Master, yes. The Dwarfs shall pay. Asmodeus shall pay.”
“The warlock pays first.”
“Master, yes.”
“And you before him.”
A long wail of torment fills the cave.
The enormous figure of Maagog remains impassive, staring into the darkness.
Seeing only revenge.
*

Episode XXXXVI

A Nest of Vipers

As dawn breaks upon the first stirrings of the 21st day of Eleint, in the ill-augured Year of the Snake…

A foreboding silence pervades Ormond’s oak-panelled hosting parlour. Kilian, Ramné, the Traveller, and our weary band of redoubtable heroes sit or stand as the rising sun shines streaming dust upon their solemn faces. The mayor paces up and down, hands clasped behind his back or worrying his pudgy chin. He thinks out loud.
“She will know, of course – this Defidia, if that is her name. If her psionic powers are what I suspect, she will know, all right. She has spies aplenty, too, and possibly some artifacts of scrying. I trust you haven’t picked up any such item?”
He pauses to scrutinise the adventurers. Haji Baba looks around guiltily, tucking the snake’s head amulet into her blouse and hiding her serpentine bracers behind her back. She feels a sudden urge to whistle.
“There will be repercussions from the townsfolk already beholden to the cult. The battle at the temple rang out loudly across all Orlane last night. And the Sunrise congregation will have already found the wreckage and bodies. They will call you heathens. Murderers. Demand you be hanged for killing the priestess, the abbot, and his Brothers. And soon there will be more to contend with. She will send her minions to deal with the infidels. That’s you, by theway. At least in their eyes. Worse yet, she may come herself. We must act quickly and decisively.”
“I would raise a militia from those people still untouched by her spell,” volunteers Kilian. “There are a few old veterans among us. But most will be farmhands, craftsmen, youngsters. I can supply some basic arms and armour, but I don’t have enough for everyone. We’ll have to improvise. Pitch forks. Fishing spears. Butchery knives. Whatever we can find. It’ll be a ragtag army, but they’ll have spirit. They’ll not relent to these Yuan-ti and their Reptile God. They shall defend our town, whatever the cost may be. They shall fight in their breeches, they shall fight…”
“We shouldn’t wait. We should take the fight to her,” says Haji Baba.
“I agree,” says Ramné. “But you have to find her first.”
“The girl?”
“Cirilli stays here. With Ormond. I’m not putting her through any more of this horror,” says Gideon. “Besides, she was blindfolded. All she knows is they covered almost twenty leagues (that’s about sixty miles – DM), and they went north. That narrows it to the northern edges of the Silent Wood, which skirts the high ground of the Hinterlands, or the Groves of Nephthys on Baal’s Head peninsula. Those dark woods have seen many nefarious activities over the centuries – cults and the like. Most folk here have never been so far. Most have never left Orlane. Some have travelled as far as Astlav. But I’ve traversed those forests in years gone. Never saw any swampy ground in either. But Nephthys would be my best bet.”
“Either way, I’m too old for such a journey,” says Ramné. “But if you need a good scout, Whiskers here has the finest nose in all the land!” And right on cue, Whiskers the weasel pokes his twitching pink nose out of the bottom of the wizard’s trousers and sniffs about. “I have some small ability with transmutation magic. I doubt I can save the crops from the blighted waters and bugs, but I will salvage what I can, so at least there will be some grain in the stores for winter. If not, all our efforts would be for nought as everyone would starve to death regardless when the first snows arrive.”
Ormond looks at the Traveller. “Gideon?”
“I’ll go. They have Cirilli’s brothers, and Bertric. And after what they did to my little girl. What they were going to do…” He trails off.
“I’ll go,” says Lighstrike.
“And me,” says Mherren, rubbing his still-throbbing cheek. He’s hardly slept. His dreams were disturbed. Haunted. There was a pulsing, green fish egg. Darkness. Pain. And something else. Someone else. A presence. Now he’s just in a bad mood. His closeness to the Demogorgon grows clouded, as though His powers and blessing were somehow muffled – out of reach. (Come on down, Mherren Halfblood, you’ve won – the Curse of Asuran! See Appendix 4 for details. Wink. Smile. Ting! – DM.) Nope. Mherren the Malevolent is officially in a Mean Mood.
“And I,” says Haji Baba. “This demigod, this abomination, is desecrating these forgotten realms. She must be stopped.”
A pause.
Everyone looks at Zimlok.
Zimlok looks up from his forkful of berry cream pancakes. He has cream all over his beak.
“Wha’?” he says.
“You comin’?”
“Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah. Of course.”
Zimlok has no idea what they’re talking about. But these blueberries really are The Business.
Ormond is staring out the window. “I’m only sorry for Dorian and Llywillan,” he sighs. For a moment, behind the flabby jowls and grease-stained chin, behind the pudgy, whisky nose and pancake belly, there is a trace of the man he used to be. The grizzled veteran. A man of purpose and ambition. “We campaigned together for six rolls of the seasons,” he says. He clenches his jaw, his fist. “I invited them here. If only I’d…”
“You’d have done the same. You didn’t know,” says Kilian. “Er, Mayor?”
A grunt.
“The goblin, Snigrot Dogroot. He – he broke out. Some kind of alchemical poison. The guards were out cold. He got the keys, somehow. Disappeared. The lieutenant wanted to send a couple of men after him. I said we need every man we’ve got.”
“We need more than that.”
“We need a miracle.”
“We need heroes,” says Lightstrike, stepping forward into a beam of morning sunlight, head held high, chest thrust forward.
Haji Baba looks around. Mherren is still in a huff. Zimlok is tucking into a third helping of berry cream pancakes. “No. We need a miracle.”
“What about Mordenkainen?” suggests Lightstrike. “Zimlok?”
“Zimlok?”
“Zimlok!”
“Wh – oh – umm – mphlffghmph – hi.” He tries a charming smile. He suddenly has teeth and there are blueberry skins in every crevice.
“If you could spare us a moment of your time. Could you use your, er, magical prowess to send a message to Mordenkainen?”
“Could I? Well of course I could. Very easily in fact. I mean, it’s a difficult spell to master, but if your wizarding is top notch, it’s a doddle.” He rummages around for a short piece of twisted, copper wire, and begins preparations for an over-elaborate and I fact entirely unnecessary pentacle complete with gothic candles, bone fragments, bits of chewed up insects and pocket fluff. Altogether he takes about an hour fussing about needlessly, trying everybody’s patience, before sitting cross-legged in the centre, waggling his wire with one eye closed and one eye half open to check everyone has their attention on him. He gabbles some indecipherable arcane syllables and breathes dramatically and deeply. All hush in expectation. Lightstrike sharpens his claws absentmindedly. Mherren torments Viper with his pokey-finger, Haji Baba polishes her staff.
Zimlok clears his throat and pronounces his words loudly and slowly. “Oh Archmage Mordenkainen, ‘tis I, Zimlok the Lightbringer, Illusionist of Renown, Wizard of Infamy, Sorcerer of Magicks Untold, Slayer of Monsters, Bane of Dragons, Dabbler in Secrets, Warrior-Sage, Maker of Legend, A Bit of An All Rounder Really, and Altogether A Jolly Good Egg By Common Consensus. Harken to my words! We visited your shop once. We’re the ones doing the whole Bloodstone of Orcus, Sword of Air Thing. Well, we’re in a bit of a jam, or it might be pickle, but whichever it is we could really do with a spot of help, if that’s not too much trouble or anything.” Zimlok realises he’s gabbling. Mystery, Zimlok, he exhorts himself. All about the mystery.
He cocks his head. Listens. Nothing.
“Erm. You may reply to this message?”
Waits.
Nothing.
He makes some slow, weaving gesticulations.
Nothing.
Hold on. Perhaps – is that the sound of waves crashing against hulls? And is that…?
Zimlok gets a sense, a weak sense, that Mordenkainen is there. But something is blocking him out. Dominating him. A sudden, numbing cold courses through Zimlok’s limbs and sinks into his stomach. He recoils, filled with dread.
After a few moments, he looks around at the others. There is a wild light in his eyes. “I couldn’t connect with him. But there was something. Like a cage. Something has broken him. It had the cold touch of the deathless. It… it reached out… it touched me. It knew I was there.”
A figure, a face, an echo in his mind’s eye. Death-white. Gaunt, with stretched, semi-translucent skin and a preternaturally long, flicking tongue. Eyes like embers. Not dissimilar to the ghouls in the cemetery. Only this one bears a crown. It stands at the prow of a war galley. The camera pans out. Four more ships. Sixteen. Sixty-four. A hundred. Two hundred. Like swarming locusts barrelling across the grey ocean in a shifting veil of spray.
Zimlok, with a sharp intake of breath, whispers urgently: “An armada is coming.”
*
Having put Whiskers on the scent, our heroes venture forth with Gideon into the wilds. The weasel keeps scurrying to and fro, but leads them with uncannily human gestures in a generally northeasterly direction, towards Baal’s Head promontory. They travel up a trade road for a while, but see no sign of merchants or wayfarers. Gideon calls it the Boneway. Talks of a bloody battle known as Desna’s Sorrow. “That was in the days before they abandoned Doresh,” says the Traveller, sucking on a toothpick. “They say the dead rest uneasy here. We best move on quickly. This road goes to Astlav, but we turn east at the Southbridge.”
They press on long into the night, but eventually make camp and pass a restless night out on exposed, howling moorland, far away from the beaten trail. Mherren’s sleep is disturbed again by visions. Flashing images of Asuran, fangs bared and hissing, of the Sword of Maagog wreathed in fire, of a black pyramid, and a pulsing, spinning green egg in a dark cave. He remains in a Mean Mood. (Another night without rest and you’ll start accumulating points of Exhaustion. Soz – DM.)
*

– The 22nd day of Eleint – Day 2 of Recon Operation “Stealth” –

As the sun rises to blot out the red stain of the Blood Comet, they quietly break their fast on Elvenbread and rehearse their spells and tend to their arms and armour. The ground gets rockier as they progress, crumpling in endless, wearying ravines to descend and climb. Clouds gather and lower, until the sun too is blotted out. Drizzle turns to rain, and soon they are all drenched. But Whiskers remains undeterred. He scampers this way and that, waggling his white tail, pausing to sniff the air, before scampering off again, then backward and forward and even waving as though gesturing them to follow.
Near the fall of eventide on that day they spy a dark expanse of woodland that spreads like fingers along a series of valleys before enveloping a whole swathe of high ground in its palm.
“The Groves of Nephthys,” mutters Gideon from beneath his hat, its brim pouring water.
Silently, they plod towards the clawed forest, and are soon surrounded by a disorienting host of needling pines. The ground is relatively clear of undergrowth, making passage easier, but it begins to get squelchier underfoot as they head deeper in. Shortly they are wading through foul-smelling, sloshing swampwater that clouds blackly as their feet disturb the bottom. Roots and vines entangle their feet and progress slows to a crawl. Lightstrike is reminded of visiting the Feywild with Ki-Shun, and the swamp around the Ichor Tree. Birdsong is sparse and solemn. The few darting insects and lizards they see are misshapen and loathsome to behold. A nauseating stench like long centuries of rot and decay fills their senses. Twilight falls, and still they push further.
Then, something of a clearing, in a depression that looks to have a rudimentary, low rampart and dyke around it, damming the surrounding waters from flooding in. Whiskers begins to run round in excited circles. Gideon notices a few large, hewn rocks piled into the rampart. Some bear scratched patterns and symbols. “Folks been building temples and shrines in these woods since the days of the Children,” says Gideon. “Centuries uncounted. Some archaeology here, look. Maybe was part of an altar to some god or spirit whose name has been lost forever to all except for Time. Look!” He points to the dry hollow. There are a few regrowing tree stumps and a large, tilted boulder. But within each stump, and behind the rock, are man-sized crevices, like warrens leading down. “I think we found our nest of vipers.”
“Spread out. Look for traps,” barks Haji Baba. “And remember. This is a reconnaissance mission. We stay undercover. Move silently. Leave no trace.”
Mherren still looks resentful. Lightstrike wonders what reconnaissance means.
Zimlok, strutting along with his keen, probing beak to the ground, walks headlong into a peculiar, viscous substance. Like a blancmange. No. More like a jelly. He moves to pull himself free. Slurp! Now he’s stuck. The more he struggles, the deeper he sinks. Trapped and floating inside a gelatinous cube, Zimlok winces at the first tickle of digestive fluids against his skin.
Uh-oh. This is gonna burn.
*
Gideon, hearing the enormous slurp, rushes over and slashes at the thing with his sword, but to little avail. He almost gets consumed too, narrowly avoiding being engulfed and rolling out at the last second, breathing hard and covered in slime.
Mherren, now really quite thoroughly cheesed off, discharges a torrent of eldritch energy into the gelatine monstrosity. But he doesn’t see the looming shadows drop down from the trees behind him. Nor does Lightstrike. Two grotesque, toad-like creatures run huge, coarse, sticky tongues across their wide lips. Caught flat-footed, Lightstrike swings wildly at the banderhobb, but its long tongue lashes out and wraps around him. It tosses him into the air like a rag doll and swallows him whole. Sword and all. Gulp! The other does the same to Mherren, even as the warlock shouts “Aithind–” Gulp!
“Really? Do I have to do everything myself?” Haji Baba looks around, shaking her head in disbelief. And as her eyes flash and blaze like lightning she slams the butt of her thunderstaff down into the black waters.
*
“What’s that, mommy?” asks a little girl of three, pointing from the attic window of a tenement in Astlav.
A flash, and a sonic boom over the forest-clad hills far to the east. The tenement judders upon its foundations, then grows still.
“The forest went boom, mommy!” The child giggles. “Booooom!”
The mother bites her lower lip. And gathers up the child.
“Booooooommmmm!” the girl shrieks with pleasure.
*
Gideon: “So, to get this straight, you’re saying we’re up a magic rope in a pocket dimension of your own design?”
Zimlok: “Yup.”
“Well, that’s somethin’ else, ain’t it.” And he blows a long, low whistle from beneath his extensive brim.
Babs: “Bit plain in here, isn’t it?”
“It’s Minimalist. It’s all the rage in arcane circles. You wouldn’t understand.”
Gideon: “And the whole magical darkness thing back there…?”
Zimlok shifts uncomfortably, pulls at his collar feathers. “That was a… mistake. Wild magic. Happens to the best of us wizards sometimes. In fact, a-hem, mostly it happens to the best of us.”
“At least they got out,” Haji Baba thumbs in the direction of Lightstrike and Mherren, who are both preening themselves of toad bile and pancreatic juices. “It’s a hard thing to swallow – being swallowed, that is.”
“I’d imagine it is most infuriating.”
“Hey, I did some laryngeal vampirical touching while I was being digested, to cunningly provoke the gag response,” says Mherren, rather indignantly.
“And I turned into a leopard and did a bit of clawing and biting from inside mine. It wasn’t all the Haji Baba Show, y’know,” says Lightstrike.
“No, of course not. You all did really well.” Haji Baba tries not to sound patronising. She does not succeed.
An awkward silence follows.
“So…” Gideon prompts, eventually.
“So basically we’re all stuck up here in Zimlok’s magic hole ‘til we figure out a plan,” says Babs.
“Will it involve more reconnaissance?” asks Lightstrike. “I thought reconnaissance was going to be all slow and boring, but it turns out it was really cool and violent and noisy. Master Light Touch – the real one, you understand – always said the sneaky stuff was important, and of course I was naturally really good at it anyway, but in all truth I always preferred just bashing stuff.”
“Erm. No. No more reconnaissance,” says Babs, a little sheepishly. Lightstrike looks disappointed.
“We’re safe in here, for an hour or so,” says Zimlok. “We could recuperate a little, but we ought to keep a lookout too on Defidia’s lair. Make sure we don’t miss any activity.”
“Then what?”
“We could attack the ramparts and flood the place. But then there are the prisoners to think about. The ones that defied her dubious charms. We can’t just sacrifice them all, can we?”
“We could poke about those stumps and that rock, see if we can find a likely entrance,” says Babs.
“Or we could just storm the place,” says Mherren. “Shock tactics.”
“We could try luring them out?” offers Zimlok. “Although Babs’ heavenly stealth detonation ought to have done the trick already.”
Babs fumes, and also feels slightly silly. And that makes her fume some more.
“And Orlane?” says Lightstrike. “Do we just leave them to their own devices? It took us a while to find this place. It could be she has already sent a taskforce to subdue the rebellion.”
“She might have gone herself,” says Gideon. “Could be we’re hovering over an empty nest. Just a few guards watching the prisoners. If they’re even still alive. Meanwhile, the townsfolk are being slaughtered.”
“But if we go back now, knowing nothing for sure, and she murders the prisoners. Or we give her a chance to put her own plans in motion…?” says Mherren. “We’re here now. I say we go, hard and fast. She’ll not know what hit her.”
“If she’s in there, she already knows we’re here.”
“It’s a dilemma, all right. Seems like there’s no ideal solution. Every option we’ve got, there are going to be bad consequences elsewhere,” says Zimlok. “It’s almost like there’s someone out there, toying with us…” (Innocent look – DM.)
“We need some good intelligence,” says Babs. “Otherwise, we’ll be going in blind. We didn’t exactly remain low-profile just now, so she’s either waiting for us where she knows she’s strongest, or she’s going to retaliate right away – or she’s already left. Either way, we need that information.”
“You mean, like reconnaissance?” asks Lightstrike, hopefully.
*
And here, dear readers, at a few minutes to midnight, we must leave our intrepid heroes and there derring-doings, pondering their next (no doubt highly strategic) move, holed up in a pocket dimension, somewhere in a fate-cursed forest in the dead of night, a silken rope the only thing between them and a pit of Yuan-ti fanatics. And perhaps their charismatic mistress. Defidia.
But just before we part, let us journey swiftly, as the crow flies, back to Orlane. To the rubble-strewn courtyard of the Temple of Geb, where several shadowy, leather-clad figures, bristling with dirks and poison-tainted crossbow quarrels, silently pick their way through the detritus. One, the drow captain known as Malice, crouches and rubs her thumb and forefinger together. She sniffs at the sticky, black residue.
“We go carefully,” she says. “We watch. And we wait. Either they know more than we thought… or they know nothing at all, and they’re getting by on nothing but good fortune and lucky hunches.”
“Impossible, Captain,” says one of her scouts. “They killed K’Varn. Now they’re after another tendril of the same weed. They must know something.”
Malice narrows her eyes. A long, thoughtful stare. “I’m not so sure.”
*
Can our battle-hardened heroes overcome the insidious evil of this self-styled Snake God and her cronies?
Will they return to Orlane – a journey of twenty leagues – to aid with Kilian’s desperate defence of the town? Or will they choose to confront Defidia in her lair?
How far does her warren extend underground…? And where are all the defenders? Just a couple of banderhobb sentries and a big stoopid jelly? Is that it?
Maybe our heroes will decide it’s really quite cosy in Zimlok’s magic hole and they’ll be quite all right staying just here thankyverymuch?
Or maybe they will risk all in a desperate assault on this nest of vipers?
How many more Orlanians must die before the spell of the reptile god can be lifted? Can any of the prisoners be rescued? What of Cirilli’s brothers, and her stepda’, Bertric?
What of the escapees: the thief, Derek Desleigh, and the goblin chef, Snigrot Dogroot? What will become of those townsfolk who have succumbed to Defidia’s charmed and been enslaved to the Cult?
Who is the “betrothed” of Defidia? Who, or what, is Defidia herself? Whom, if anyone, does she serve or ally herself with?
And for crying out loud, what in Geb’s name does any of this have to do with the bleedin’ Sword of Air?
Find out (maybe) in the next sssssensational episode of…

Sword of Air

Starring…
Lightstrike the Epic………….Zach


Mherren the Malevolent……….Alex


Haji Baba the Grand………..Aneta



And Zimlok the Lightbringer…Dan


Guest starring…
G Pops…..as the General Populace and All Of Life Past And Present, Apart From the Four Aforementioned

Storyboard developed by…
The Fickle Whims of Fate

Appendix 1

A History of Arcady

see picture gallery

Appendix 2

The Prophecy of the Speaker

see picture gallery

Appendix 3

Zimlok’s Reading List

(Spell cards to follow.)
You can copy all of these, plus your existing spells, into Balladidh’s Grimoire when you find opportunity for a Full Rest (24 hours of downtime). So long as you are wearing your Hat of Wizardry, you can try to cast an unfamiliar cantrip once between Long Rests, and you do not need any material spell components except for select rare and powerful spells identified by the DM, such as reincarnation magic. Remember you’re not totally limited by your spell slots, either. You can attempt to cast beyond your slot allocation at risk of harnessing Wild Magic, or you can cast some spells as rituals, which takes longer but doesn’t use a slot.

Balladidh’s Grimoire (PHB):

Bestow curse, feign death, counterspell, stinking cloud, animate dead, nondetection, knock, magic mouth

A Discussion of Morality and Spirituality in Native Witchcraft Prctices of Old Barcella, As Disputed Between His Most Esteemable Grace Huang’di, and His Adviser, Boki (BLS):

Reshape metal, barbaric yawp* (*or barbaric squawk, if you prefer)

A Short Criticism of Elementalism (XGE):

Enemies abound, erupting earth

The Change – Notes (Deep Magic pp.198, 90, 317 & 40):

Catch the breath, legion of rabid squirrels, nest of infernal vipers, aspect of the serpent

Appendix 4

The Curse of Asuran

This magical curse takes effect whenever the target takes a short or long rest, filling their thoughts with horrible images and dreams. The cursed target gains no benefit from finishing a short or long rest. The curse lasts until it is lifted by a remove curse spell or similar magic. Every 24 hours after taking effect, the target gains a point of Exhaustion.
1 Disadvantage on ability checks
2 Speed halved
3 Disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws
4 Hit point maximum halved
5 Speed reduced to 0
6 Death

Appendix 5

Game Stuff

The Rope Trick spell lasts for an hour. After that, you’ll be tumbling out of the pocket dimension and into the swampy waters of the Groves of Nephthys. You can look down over the dry hollow where you suspect Defidia’s lair to be located, as though looking through a window. This is invisible from the outside, and at the moment the rope is hauled in, so there is no evidence of your presence from the forest floor.
One character can Keep Watch with a Perception check for the time you stay in the pocket dimension, or another character can Help them on the roll, granting Advantage. But characters on Watch won’t be able to roll Hie Dice or recover spell slots. Otherwise, you can benefit from a Short Rest if you choose, allowing you to spend any Hit Dice you wish to, to replenish hit points up to your maximum, and recover spell slots as your class features allow. You can use any healing potions or magic you wish, and make any other preparations you desire before the next adventure.
Look at your inventory and what’s in the bag of holding, think about how you’re going to arm yourselves and which spells might be best to prepare. The DM has considered several plans you might devise, but has every faith you will manage to concoct something ludicrous and improbable that he hasn’t thought of.
… And, annoyingly, it will probably work.
Mherren – your curse (see Appendix 4) means you gain no benefits from resting, so you can’t spend Hit Dice, or recover spell slots, but you can be healed by magic or by drinking a potion, if necessary. You can also keep any Strength bonus you may have acquired from drawing blood with the Sword of Maagog. Also, are you aware that from level 5 you got two beams of Eldritch Blast? Make sure you know the difference between spells and invocations, too. Might be worthwhile y’all checking your class features and abilities in the PHB to see if any of them have increased in power as you’ve increased in level. Or just to see how anything works, really (ahem, Babs, ahem).
Make sure you’ve added any treasure listed at the back of recent recaps to your character sheets. Haji Baba, I suspect you have a not inconsiderable collection of potions that you are blissfully unaware of (from Episode 39). Lightstrike, you can only use your Boots of Haste once per day, and after a minute you cannot Move or take Actions until the end of your next turn. Also, remember to counter the DM’s damage rolls by declaring Uncanny Dodge! You can halve all damage, dude!
Add your experience points, shown below, and we’ll probably be looking at reaching the heady heights of Level 7 by the end of this mission. Take a look at your class options in the PHB. You might want to consider employing a/some retainer(s) at that point, to go on other errands and quests for you, or to begin to establish some kind of base of operations. (You don’t have to, though. You could just press on as the wildcard maverick outlaws you have become.)
In the interests of game balance, we’ll probably have to begin using the magic item attunement rules, which stipulate each character can only employ a magic item’s properties if they have bonded to it, and this is limited to 3 items each. Not all items require attunement, but all the more high-powered ones do. So soon you’ll have to decide which three items to equip, as well as deciding on spells to prepare.
In his wisdom, the DM has also preened back the Inspiration rules a tad. If you have Inspiration you can:
 Roll at Advantage, Impose Disadvantage on an enemy, or add a Bardic Inspiration Die to your d20 roll (that’s a d8 between levels 5-10).
I’m afraid this somewhat impedes your penchant for beheading things, Lightstrike, but you can no longer autocrit with Inspiration.
Take note of your attack rolls. High rolls can mean extra damage. If you beat an AC by 5, you get to roll an additional damage die. Exceed it by 10, and you roll that damage die at Advantage (i.e., roll twice and take the higher result). Also, you can imbibe potions (e.g., potions of healing) as a Bonus Action, but they must be handy, and you can’t be wielding a two-handed great-sword or heavy crossbow, etc., at the same time. Remember it takes an Action to grab an item from the bag of holding.
A “Mighty Deed” is an extra d4 you can roll to see if you can pull off some feat during combat. It works a bit like getting a free Bonus Action, but only if your attack is successful. Sometimes it’s worth invoking a Mighty Deed so you don’t have to squander a whole Action on a manoeuvre, although your chances of success are probably not as great. It’s useful for doing the kind of stuff featured under the Battle Master archtype on p.74 of the PHB. Final rule to squeeze in – when you stabilise after going unconscious, you acquire a point of Exhaustion. You stabilise by making a successful Death Save before three failures, or by magical or medical healing.

This table lays out your Experience Points:
Ghouls x12 5,400
Yuan-ti Broodguard 450
Gnoll Flesh Gnawer 200
Gnolls x4 400
Abramo (Yuan-ti Pit Master) 1,800
Black Pudding 1,100
Asuran (Keep the Sword!)* 100
Golem Trap 50
Rescue Cirilli 500
Gelatinous Cube 450
Banderhobbs x2 3,600
TOTAL 14,050
Per player 3,513

*You get the full XP reward for defeating Asuran if you do so on his own Plane, so he cannot reform.


And here is your lovely Treasure:

History of Arcady (fragment)
Prophecy of the Speaker
Psalms of the Frog
Balladidh’s Grimoire (Enduring Spellbook)
A Discussion of Morality and Spirituality in Native Witchcraft Prctices of Old Barcella, As Disputed Between His Most Esteemable Grace Huang’di, and His Adviser, Boki
A Short Criticism of Elementalism
The Change – Notes (by Misha)
2 vials of Black Pudding Juice (1d6 poison damage)
Thunderous Kazoo
Brooch of Shielding
Coin of Silence
Worry Stone
Hat of Wizardry
Bezoar of the Manticore

Until next time…

… “Au revoir!"

THE END (FOR NOW…)